My Three Peaks Challenge – Leg 1: Autumn 2018

This is the first in what will be a series of post about my experiences in fundraising and training for the Three Peaks challenge, which I am tackling in June 2019. I hope this is somewhat interesting to read, but this is more of a record for me of the things I’ve done so far.

So, a quick explanation of what I’m actually doing! I’m part of the RAG at my university (short for Raising and Giving society), which raises money for various charities each year. One of the ways we do this is people doing challenges, and the Three Peaks is one of these. To participate, you have to raise £600 throughout the year. This partly helps to fund the trip, but the majority of it goes to charity, in my case Action Against Hunger.

If you haven’t heard of the Three Peaks challenge, the aim of it is to climb the highest peaks in Scotland (Ben Nevis), England (Scafell Pike) and Wales (Snowdon) within 48 hours. It’s supposed to be a reasonable challenge to complete, with most of the difficulty lying in the lack of sleep you’ll get on the trip rather than the physical climbing. You have to catch what sleep you can on minibuses! It should be hard, but also a rewarding challenge, and I would really like to use this to force me to up my fitness in 2019. This is something I’ve been doing on and off for months, but I would love 2019 to be the year that I maintain this habit.

I’m writing this on December 31st, 2018, and so far, the main concern has been fundraising. As I write this, I’m almost halfway to my £600 goal, mostly down to the fantastic generosity of my friends and family. The majority of my fundraisers will be taking place in the Spring Semester (January – March) but I did a couple before the Christmas holidays hit. My housemate is doing the challenge along with me, which is making it even more fun, but also means that we can do fundraisers and activities together! Admittedly, our first event was a pretty big fail. We arranged to screen the movie Pitch Perfect during the last week of term, which people could come and see for a donation of their choice. This doesn’t sound that exciting but getting to see a popular film (that isn’t on Netflix) for a couple of pounds is something that students LOVE. However, we didn’t choose the best date, as everyone was panicking over deadlines, and unfortunately no-one turned up. Fundraising is definitely a big learning experience.

I followed this up with an individual fundraiser a week or so later. Once home for the holidays, I arranged to do a bake sale at my old secondary school, which my younger sister still attends. Her friends were kind enough to bake for me, as I was only returning from university very late the night before the sale. Thanks to my sister and her friends, the sale was pretty successful! I raised just over £80, which knocked out almost a sixth of my fundraising target in one go! People are surprisingly generous when you put a lot of work into something.

So that pretty much sums up where I’m up to so far. I’m almost halfway to my target, which I never expected to hit so early! In terms of fitness, I spent my Autumn semester going to my local gym when I could, working on general stamina and trying out different machines so that I’m equipped to jump into a more structured workout routine come the new year.

If you’ve made it this far into my post, thank you so much for reading! I never thought that I would be tackling a challenge like this, so hopefully by recording it I can look back at the early stages and be proud of what I end up achieving! If you’re able to give, or just want to have a nosy at the live updates of what I’ve been doing, you can check out my page here.

By the next time that I update, I hope to be much nearer my target, and also able to say that I’ve managed to nail down a regular exercise routine! Have you ever fundraised before, or tackled a physical challenge like the Three Peaks? I’ve love to hear stories of people doing similar things (and reassure me that I’m going to be able to do it)!

This is an amazing challenge, I attempted it back in 2013 (I think), but sadly had to drop out after completing Ben Nevis as I managed to pull a ligament in my knee. Good luck, it is tough, but well worth it, Snowden was definitely my favourite, climbed it 5 times now. Best training advice I can give is to practise climbing really long stair cases, that was the best thing I did to prepare and it really paid off. Cant wait to see how you get on.xx
angelwingsandpetticoats.com

That’s such a shame! I’ve been walking up and down the stairs in my house a lot, probably to the annoyance of my housemates😂 I’ve not climbed any of them before so I’m really excited! Thank you – I’m hoping to do another post at the end of the semester and then one when I’ve completed the challenge! X